“Do you know how to make them?”
I shrugged. “It can’t be that hard if my sister can do it.”
I took the packs from the cupboard and we set to work. Our first attempts were gelatine blobs, but it tasted okay so we ate them anyway. Brian got fed up waiting for the jelly to set so when he flipped it out of the bowl it spread like a jellyfish on Dollymount Strand. He tried spooning the remaining custard on top of it. We surveyed our work.
“It looks like an alien,” I said.
“Or a custard beastie . . .”
We looked at each other, grinning, before wordlessly hunting down wizened old carrots from the bottom of the vegetable drawer. Our creative genius set to work – the Custard Beastie was born.
Brian and I wangled extra supplies of custard and jelly from our parents, who could have sworn they just bought it last week. We assured them they hadn’t.
Custard Beasties began to appear on letterboxes, park benches and gate pillars around the greater Raheny area. Lime-green, red and blackberry-flavoured jelly formed the base. We used food colour to dye the custard various shades, sometimes we’d end up with a tie-dye effect that was rather artistic, or so we liked to think. Dead bluebottles were gathered from windowsills and encased in the moulds.
The real finishing touch came with the added accessories. Nothing was safe – my mother’s false eyelashes, my sister’s striped Bay City Rollers socks. Brian tried to borrow his grandmother’s dentures but inconveniently she’d woken up.
Now, I should say our Beasties came to this earth with a message for humankind. We attached notes to them with cocktail sticks. From “You’ve been beastied!” to “Beware! The Beasties are coming!” or “Attack of the Beasties!”
On some level we hoped to start a kind of HG Wells War of the Worlds reaction. The Beasties would usually appear after dark, thanks to our agility and ability to climb out windows. Strangely, our Beasties failed to make the pages of the Northside People. Our supplies dried up and our desire to make our Beasties famous didn’t extend as far as spending our pocket money on jelly and custard powder, and mud just didn’t have the same effect.
I was sitting on the wall one night with Brian. My parents were out to dinner and my sister was in charge. She was in the back room listening to Neil Young and blowing smoke out the window.
“I’m bored,” he said. “We should liven this road up.”
“How?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Nic Nak?”
I tutted. “That’s for kids.” After a moment’s silence, I continued. “My dad told me when he was a boy he used to tie a piece of thread from a lamppost to a bush. It was so thin you couldn’t see it but it could knock a man’s hat back off his head.”
“We could try it with old fella Murphy when he comes home from the pub. What time is it?”
“How would I know?”
“Have you even got any thread?”
I threw him a withering look, silently slipping off the wall. I returned with an industrial-size cob of thread. You have those lying around the house when the family business is a sewing factory.
“Cool. How much is on it?”
“Fifty thousand feet.”
“That should do it.”
We tied thread from tree to tree and from streetlight to pillar. We’d watch unsuspecting walkers as they swatted what they thought was a gnat nipping at them. But the best was when Mr Murphy came swaying up the road.
For years, he had subjected his neighbours to visits on his way home from the local. It started off as a friendly “Just dropping in to say hello. Whiskey, did you say? Ah, sure, I’ll just have a drop,” but progressed to my mum having to forcibly close the hall door on him as he attempted to gain entry to our house, and drinks cabinet. By day, Mr Murphy was the most respectable-looking man of the estate. He wore a shirt and tie even though he was retired and a brown tweed jacket with patches on the elbows. Yet by evening a different beast emerged (not of the custard type either). One afternoon he stopped me on the road with a message for me to pass on to my mother and father. I stood solemnly nodding as he ripped shreds from their character, painting them to be Judases that were no longer welcome in his home. He didn’t use foul language, and was eloquently spoken, albeit slurred. I ran home, eyes stinging from the insults and whiskey fumes that tumbled out of him. My parents dismissed it – the tirade was sparked by my mother telling him, whilst he was sober, that he was not to knock on our door drunk again. My father was hurt though, I could see it in his eyes. A non-drinker himself, he’d been very tolerant of Mr Murphy’s invasions.
So that night when Old Man Murphy came swaying up the road after ten too many, vengeance for the family honour was mine. Okay, so thread-pinging isn’t exactly on the level of a horse’s head in the bed but it wasn’t bad considering my age, limited resources and animal-loving nature. It was with great satisfaction I watched as Murphy flinched, walked on, slapped his face, waved his arms until as the thread became denser his arms and legs flayed in random motion as though he were being controlled by an invisible and mad puppeteer. Watching from the safety of an upstairs bedroom, the sight was as sweet as a summer stick of rock from West Cork.
Brian’s older brother was walking behind Murphy. A Mod in a long black coat and Doc Martens, Karl rarely broke into a smile, not in front of his kid brother and his dorky friend, that is. I thought Karl was the most handsome boy on the planet. He cocked his thumb as he came in, a grin on his face.
“I’ve just seen old fella Murphy trying to do a break dance all the way up the street!”
Proudly, we let him in on our secret. Instead of being impressed and seeing me in a whole new light, he said we weren’t thinking big or bold enough. He asked for the cob of thread and told us to follow him. We watched as he ran the thread from pole to pole across the road. I wasn’t sure what he was playing at. I mean, thread wouldn’t affect a car. Still Karl walked from pole to pole until the thread was no more. Looking back I realise our road must have been very quiet, but then Ireland in the seventies was a different place, and not every household owned a car. Still, we didn’t have to wait long. A car approached, drove through the thread and then stopped. I was right. Thread was no match for a car. However, it did cause the wipers to fly up on the windscreen. Now, if I was writing fiction, this is the point my editor would challenge me, but what can I say – that’s what happened. The driver, a neighbour in her early twenties, drove on after a few moments to her family home a few doors up. Within minutes her mother, wearing slippers and chenille dressing gown appeared. We ran for cover but we hadn’t moved quickly enough to hide the evidence. From the house we could see her inspecting the trail of broken thread.
Next came the door banging.
“Come out here, you gurriers! I’ve been watching you all night! Open this door!”
No chance. Yet she kept banging.
“Our Yvonne thought she’d driven through a ghost the way her wipers moved. You’re not going to get away with this! Siobhán McKenna, looking like butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth – wait until your mother gets home!” Bang, bang.
I’m not sure which was more thrilling – being persecuted by Mrs Gunn in her fluffy nightclothes or colluding with the most handsome boy on the planet, who it appeared was seeing me for the first time. None of it lasted, of course. Karl got bored and went to play his LPs, not inviting us to join him. Mrs Gunn, who eventually gave up, lay in wait for my parents. When they pulled into the driveway, she was across the road quicker than a Mad March Hare.
“I’m going to get it now for letting you stay on the road,” said my sister, rolling her eyes, but the admonishment never came.
My mum apologised but gave Mrs Gunn short shrift. Although Dad never said anything, I could have sworn there was a glint of pride in his eyes that his youngest daughter was keeping the tradition of his 1940s Cork city-centre practical pranks alive in modern Dublin suburbia.
My career as a practical joker spanned my entire childhood. From the mud pies, to th
e first whoopee cushion Dad bought me from Hector Grey’s discount stall on Moore Street, to Custard Beasties – right up until I did my Leaving Cert at sixteen where in school I was more interested in being a master itching-powder purveyor, plastic-spider placer and, yes, if I’m being honest, placing wind-inducing power in the canteen soup, than I was in my French grades.
If I was a child again, I’d recapture the innocence and laughter of those practical jokes that never really did anyone harm. Perhaps we helped a drunken man to consider cutting back on his scoops the following night. And maybe the young driver might have slowed down and not be so quick to declare seeing a ghost again. So really in a way Brian and myself were providing a community service . . . though as I said, I’m not sure everyone shared our childhood view of the world.
Siobhán McKenna is a best-selling contemporary fiction novelist, short-listed for an Irish Book Award, and winner of Poolbeg/TV3’s Write a Bestseller competition 2011. Through her affiliation and training with Deepak Chopra MD, she is currently writing her first non-fiction work. She lives on the Dublin coast with her family, rescue dogs, and a variety of wildlife, which includes foxes, red squirrels, hawks and a wandering peacock.
Story 29: Play It Again, Sam
Roisin Meaney
I don’t remember much about my childhood – it happened too long ago. If I try to think back that far, mostly what I get are snatches of isolated incidents: a raggedy chorus being sung by the assorted occupants of the back seat of a car on the way to some holiday or other; sinking in mud up to the tops of my white ankle socks at the edge of some lake; sliding down a haystack in a field in County Clare (cue one angry farmer); a tabby cat being wheeled around in the giant pram we all served time in; one of my brothers looking green around the gills after drinking paraffin that had been stored in a lemonade bottle. The usual kind of thing.
In general, I’m fairly sure my childhood comprised the usual mix of juvenile traumas, adventures, discoveries, triumphs and near-disasters that I imagine most children experience – a best-of-times, worst-of-times kind of upbringing. We muddled along together as siblings do, we fell out and made up and fell out again on a pretty regular basis, and nobody got seriously injured in the process.
But let me rummage around a little more thoroughly in my head and pull out what tatty remnants of my early years lurk there, in order to decide how I might relive a day as a child, if I ever got the chance.
I can declare with some certainty that I was the third-born in a good Irish Catholic seven-child family, slotted between an older and a younger brother. I was the second, and definitely the less scholarly, of two girls (my sister was an exemplary student – our mutual teachers couldn’t believe we were related).
It’s depressingly evident from photos of the time that I was not a good-looking child. In my defence, I would like to make it clear that this wasn’t entirely my fault. Until I was about ten my mother sent me to the barber, along with my five brothers, to get my hair cut. The barber lived five or six doors away from us, and carried out after-hour operations in his own home (and probably gave my mother some kind of a group discount – six for the price of five, maybe). No allowance was made for the fact that I was, in fact, female. My crew cut was identical to my brothers’, complete with the buzzer-up-the-back-of-the-head manoeuvre to finish it off. For some reason my sister was spared this ignominy, and floated through her (swotty) childhood with long girly hair.
Thankfully, I was eventually deemed too old to be sent to a male-oriented hairdresser – but rather than this leading to an improvement in my appearance, things went from bad to decidedly worse. My mother got it into her head that she could easily fulfil the role of my hair stylist: all she needed was a kitchen scissors, a sheet of newspaper, a towel – and a pudding bowl. Cross my heart. I must have been the most obliging and compliant child ever.
In addition, I had the sweet tooth that seemed a mandatory characteristic of the members of my generation. At every opportunity I sucked bulls’ eyes and gobstoppers, chewed penny toffees, devoured sherbet sticks – you name it, I ate it. Inevitably, I was punished for my inveterate munching and crunching with a visit to the dentist, who took one look at the sorry state of affairs inside my mouth and declared that several teeth would have to be removed, before they contaminated the few decent ones I had left.
Thankfully they were my milk teeth, and were replaced before long with more grown-up versions, most of which I’ve managed to hang on to, but the memory of having a cotton-wool mask laid on my face and soaked with ether, and being held down by at least four adults as I thrashed and roared in an effort to draw a breath, remains as terrifyingly vivid today as it was then.
Add to the homemade hairstyle and gummy appearance the fact that I wore glasses from the age of about six, the ones they handed out free to the less affluent short-sighted kids among us, and you have some idea of how photogenic a child I made.
Notwithstanding my gawkish appearance, or maybe in an effort to compensate for it, my parents decided to send me to piano lessons at around eight years of age. Mrs O’Malley lived up the road (in the opposite direction to the barber) and taught piano to various schoolchildren. I was duly enrolled, and began my tuition.
To the best of my recollection, I lasted six weeks. I hadn’t a musical bone in my body – or if I did, it was well hidden behind whatever else was inside there. I detested having to practise, and did so with a very bad grace. I nearly took the sitting-room door off its hinges every time I went in for the obligatory half hour. I would sit at the piano and plink and plonk joylessly until I was allowed to come out.
In vain, poor Mrs O’Malley battled to instil a love of music in me. Week after week I continued to learn nothing at all, and eventually it was agreed all round that the money being spent on the lessons could be put to far better use. (Needless to say, my sister took to the piano immediately, and played beautifully for years. Maybe the long hair helped.)
Ironically, I would dearly love to be able to play the piano, or any instrument, now, but I figure that the old-dog-new-tricks principle probably applies, and I’m afraid to try taking up an instrument again in case I fail miserably for the second time.
To be honest, I’m not altogether sure I would wish to relive my childhood. Since hitting adulthood I’ve always been a big fan of children, and enjoy their company enormously, but to go back myself and do it all again isn’t something that fills me with eagerness.
If I only had to do it for twenty-four hours though, if I had just one day to fill as my childish self – and if it could be slotted somehow into my actual childhood, so whatever I did during that day would impact on all that came after it – here’s how I’d spend it.
Assuming money was no object (and this is fantasy, so let’s give me an unlimited budget here) I would start with an appointment at a top hair salon. I would demand the most accomplished stylist and place myself in his or her hands, and hope for the best. Maybe if I got one decent cut, it would make my mother realise that her younger daughter deserved better than Bob the Barber (not his real name!) or her good self as my coiffeur.
Hair sorted, I’d move on to my next appointment. I’d knock on Mrs O’Malley’s door and present myself for my first piano lesson – and this time I’d pay attention, and listen to the instruction, and move my fingers as directed. I’d do my best to take in all that the good woman was saying, in the hope that if I started on the right note (oops) I might find the motivation to carry on, and possibly even get to the stage, many months or years hence, where I could sit at a piano and produce sounds that I, and others, would actually want to hear.
After leaving Mrs O’Malley’s house I’d visit the chemist and invest in a new toothbrush, giving the sweet shop a wide berth on the way. Knowing now what I know about the horrors of ether, I’d do my damndest to keep away from the toffees and the liquorice allsorts and switch to apples and oranges and the like, and a swanky new toothbrush just might encourage me in my quest for healthier gnashers.
And finally, I’m not sure if contact lenses had been invented when I was small – I didn’t come into possession of a pair until years later – but I’d hunt around, and if they were to be got I’d invest in a pair, and throw the free specs into the nearest bin.
And then I’d go home and wait for the gasps of admiration before heading into the sitting room to do an hour of piano practice.
Despite having lived in Africa, London, Canada and San Francisco, Roisin Meaney is Irish through and through. In 1977 she entered a competition on the back of a cereal box and won a car. In 2001 she entered a Write a Bestseller competition and won a two-book publishing deal. Since then she’s had nine adult novels and two children’s books published, and she’s made the Irish top five fiction list three times (with one number one). Her books have been translated into several languages and two have been published in the US and Canada. She currently lives with a cat in the West of Ireland. In her spare time she tells stories to tots in her local library, gives writing workshops to anyone who’ll listen to her, and occasionally enjoys a pint of Guinness, washed down with a nice red wine.
Story 30: Hey, Skinny
Helen Moorhouse
“Hey, Skinny! What are you doing inside here on a lovely day like today?”
“I’m reading my book.”
“Well, can’t you do that outside? You’re awful pasty. Go and get a bit of Vitamin D, you miserable thing – but make sure you put on a good slather of sunscreen.”
“But I’ll never get a tan if I wear sunscreen! I’ve been trying to get a watch-mark on my arm . . . but I just get bored sunbathing.”
“It’s not your natural habitat.”
“There’s nothing to do except lie there and, anyway, it’s a total waste of time – no matter how burned I get, it never turns a proper brown. I don’t think I’m trying hard enough.”
If I Was a Child Again Page 17
